Thursday, June 14, 2012

So here we
are, folks, my final post before my hiatus.
Everyone who comes to this address in the next few months is going to
see this post, so I didn’t want to end on the merciless pieces I’ve been doing
recently. The most obvious thing
to do is to simply repeat the piece that best sums up all the others, The Ultimate Story Checklist, but a link will do. Please go there if you want a systematic study of how you
can use this blog to improve your story.

But one
thing about the checklist is that it’s very exhaustive, so not all those ideas
are ones I can claim. And so, for
this “see you later” piece, I wanted to take a moment to review twenty ideas that were
generated by this blog that I hadn’t heard
anywhere before. I could just make
this a list of links, but I’d rather try to re-state each one in a
self-contained way, as succinctly as possible:

Nobody can become a hero by doing what anybody would do. A hero should have special skills, and be surrounded by people who lack his/her heroic attributes.

It’s not
very helpful to think about an “inciting incident.” It’s more helpful to think about a longstanding problem
leading the hero to pursue an intimidating opportunity which leads to an unforeseen conflict.

Story comes
from a volatile reaction between character and situation, in which each
transforms the other.

A hero
needn’t be smart, but must be resourceful. (Even fools can resourcefully go after what they want, which
is why it’s impossible to make anything foolproof.) This is because audiences find it painful to care for characters that don’t care about themselves.

A
character’s “metaphor family” is the aspect of his/her background (usually his/her home
region, job or developmental state) that determines his/her slang, exclamations, and
points of comparison.

A
character’s voice breaks down into three components: metaphor family, default
personality trait, and default argument strategy. You don’t need to know everything about a character, you
just have to know these three things.

The best
scenes consist of two characters trying to trick and trap each other, resulting
in at least one of them doing something they didn’t intend to do when the scene
began. There’s nothing immoral about engaging in this behavior.

In the best
scenes, there is literal give and take (an object is exchanged, representing
larger values), and literal push and pull (characters touch each other at least
once, and often only once, to symbolize the completion of the goal).

Sometimes,
rather than have an ensemble of fully-rounded three dimensional characters,
it’s better to have an ensemble of exaggerated, polarized characters. One is better at recreating actual
interpersonal conflicts, but the other is equally legitimate because it dramatizes
our own internal debates.

The second
quarter of a story is usually about tackling the problem the easy way, and ends
in a disaster.

The third
quarter of a story is usually about trying again the hard way, and ends in a
spiritual crisis.

A hero
should start out with a false statement of philosophy, which is only replaced
by a true statement of philosophy as a result of the spiritual crisis.

The best way to make a hero compelling is to make him/her misunderstood.

The theme of
a story should never be stated in terms of “good vs. bad”, which is a
no-brainer, but rather in terms of “good vs. good” or “bad vs. bad”

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

So things
are looking bleak for our heroes…
They have been lied to from all sides, fed false dreams and
get-rich-quick schemes… They have discovered that the touchy-feely artsy-fartsy
profession they thought they were entering is actually a hyper-professional,
mercilessly exploitative, brutally competitive visit to the thunderdome!

Can it get
any worse? Well, here’s another seemingly terrible thing you realize after graduation… Every
profession is changing very fast these days, but none faster than
filmmaking.

When people
advise you to get a liberal arts education as opposed to learning specific job
skills, one reason they often give is that you’ll end up getting a job that
didn’t exist when you started school, but now we’ve escalated beyond that. My first real desk job, after a few
years delivering pizzas, was one that didn’t exist when I graduated college: digital video editor. And I know a lot of people with that same experience.

If you’re
foolish enough to go to film school, they’re going to teach you all about the
profession…or at least how the profession was when your teachers were actually
in it. Not only is that knowledge already out of date, but even the most
current information will change by the time you’re ready to earn a
paycheck.

Everything
you learn, and yes, that includes every rule on this blog, has a short shelf
life. If you think of your
education as progress toward the goal of total knowledge, then I’ve got
terrible news for you: you’re moving backwards down that path, not
forwards. Knowledge shrinks faster
than it can ever grow, because every year there’s going to be more and more new
things you can’t keep up with.

On the one
hand, this is terrible news! All
that education was for naught! All
the know-how and savvy that you had planned to flaunt at job interviews becomes
a liability, not an asset, once you realize that it’s all out of date…

…But this is
all okay, because while time can render your knowledge obsolete, it can’t take
your experience away, and that’s what
you’re really selling. You don’t want
to brag about what systems you’ve worked with or how much education you have,
you want to say to employers, “Hire me because I’ve adapted before and I’ll
adapt again, the next time everything changes.” Nothing beats that argument.

Once you
realize this, your whole perspective changes for the better. Suddenly you realize that every mistake
you made, every dead end you followed, every boss you pissed off …these are
your assets. There are no real career missteps, because it all gets added to your store of
experience, so it all makes you more valuable.

Okay, folks,
that’s it: Twelve rough life-lessons from me to you, in hopes that you’ll avoid
some of my mistakes. So do I leave you on this harrowing note? Of
course not! Tomorrow, I’ll put up
my final post before hiatus: a list of my twenty favorite things I discovered
through this blog…

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

When I got
started as a video editor, I had to painstakingly log every scene, sort them
into hundreds of carefully-described bins, and slowly discover which clips
worked together through painstaking trial and error.

Then as I
got better, I started to develop a “sixth sense”. As I previewed the raw footage, I was able to spot which
clips would be the most useful. I
quickly discarded all the footage I wasn’t going to use without logging
it. As I edited, I started making
fewer “rough cuts” because I knew instinctively where to cut into a clip and
where to cut back out.

I got paid by the job, not by the hour, so one benefit of this was that I was able to do more work and make more money. “Finally,” I thought, “this is
what real professional editing is like.”

But I was
wrong. When I started hanging out
with real feature editors, I was shocked to see how they worked. I visited the editor of Todd Solondz’s
movie “Happiness” and I saw that she (or an assistant, when she had one) had
not only logged each clip with exhaustive detail, but she had gone much
further…

She had
painstakingly subdivided each clip into each sentence of dialogue, and then
created a separate sequence for every sentence in the movie,
demonstrating how it sounded from every possible angle. She explained that this was standard,
because you never knew when the director was going to say “I’m sure there was a
better take of that line, let me hear them all.”

Intuition,
as it turns out, follows a bell curve.
You start off with little, develop a lot of it as you become a cocky
young turk, and then you abandon it again as you become a master. The better you get, the less intuitive
your job is, and the more drudgework you do.

This turns
out to be equally true of screenwriting as well, for several reasons:

As with
video editors, once you’re getting paid real money, you have to be able to show
your work, to prove that you made the best choices.

You also have
to be able to reverse engineer every decision you make, to undo it and redo in
10 slightly different ways.

But even if
you’re just writing for yourself, you find that the more you know, the less you
trust yourself. You’ve had too
many scripts go wrong because you coasted on intuition until you crashed. You force yourself to slow down and
work more methodically, so that you can backtrace your steps at any times.

So was all that experience for
nothing, given that you end up working just as menially at the top as you did at
the bottom? Is there any hope for
your heroes? Yes, there is. Tomorrow we will find a ray of hope in
our grand finale…

Monday, June 11, 2012

The most
reliable way for an aspiring screenwriter to secure representation is to win a
contest, and that’s what I did. I
wrote a bio-pic of Alan Turing (who broke the Nazi codes during World War 2 and
helped invent the computer) which won a Sloan award and a Columbia award.

Based on
that script and a lower-budget thriller script, I got managers, who circulated
the Turing script to a few small companies. As it turned out, it got me a lot of meetings, and it’s
still getting me work as a writing sample, but it never sold. My reps weren’t that surprised, since
they said the subject matter was a hard sell. Maybe it would have sold a few years ago, but there weren’t
a lot of spec sales anymore because money was tight…

So imagine how it felt when I read one day that a studio had just paid a cool million
dollars for an Alan Turing biopic from a first-time screenwriter…who wasn’t
me. I can’t help but think of that
as the million dollars that I didn’t make.

Of course,
that screenplay might be a lot better than mine (I can’t bring myself to read
it) but as soon as it sold, I knew what I’d really done wrong… I chose to live
in fantasy camp.

There are
several biographies of Turing, but only one that really goes in depth. I knew that I should attempt to option
that book, but I never did.
Instead, two producers optioned it and hired another first-time writer
to tackle it. Obviously, if I had
already been attached, these producers would have had to come to me with their proposal, and if they liked my script enough to back it, we would have been in business…

I complained
in my “What’s the Matter With Hollywood” pieces about Hollywood’s insistence on
owning a property, but I never took that lesson to heart. If you bring them a bio-pic that you
just sniffed out of the air, then they’ll be suspicious… if this story is just
lying around, how come nobody’s used it before? But if you bring it to them as something that you’ve locked
up…and you can sell them the exclusive rights to, then that will seem like
something of value.

So why did I
never attempt to option the in-depth biography, which was long out-of-print,
and quite possibly not under option when I first wrote my script? Because I was still living in fantasy
camp. I convinced myself that I
didn’t really need to secure the rights, because I had drawn on five or six
books, so I could claim that I had used less than 51% of any one book.

But
honestly, I was afraid that I’d track down the author and find out that
somebody did have the rights. I was so enamored of the potential value of this subject that I
was terrified to discover the actual
value. If they said “Someone else
owns the rights, so cease and desist” then even though I still might have been
legally able to pursue a competing project, I would have been too bummed.

And besides,
what if I had been unable to afford the option? When every script is just fantasy camp, then it seems silly
to lay out any money. Don’t
screenwriters create value out of thin air? Why pay for that?

I’ll tell
you why: One Million Dollars…that I didn’t make because I was more interested
in the fantasy of writing a screenplay than I was in treating this like a
business.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

For years, I
mistakenly thought I was paying my dues: I wrote a lot of screenplays, first
ones that were terrible and later ones that were better, and I did odd jobs
for big-time screenwriters, like organizing an Emmy winner’s library, and
editing banquet-dinner videos for an Academy Award nominee... But then I realized that actual dues-paying has nothing to
do with learning your craft or impressing potential employers.

Aspiring
screenwriters often think: “I’ll write a dozen screenplays, on my own, behind
closed doors, then, one lucky day, my talent will be spotted by someone on the
‘inside’, who will read my work and love it. Some calls will be made, and by the end of the day, I will
suddenly have an agent, a studio contract, and a check for a million
dollars. Then I’ll decide whether
or not I ever want to work again.”

We somehow
think that the day we make our first sale is the day our dues paying ends. This is utterly backwards. “Paying dues” actually refers to
doing excellent work in your chosen
profession that pleases your boss
but does not please yourself. Doing paid work of the kind you want to do, but working on projects you
don’t really believe in.

Writers are
constantly fed fairy-tale stories of writers like Quentin Tarantino, J.K.
Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, Diablo Cody, etc., who supposedly hit it out of the
park their first time at bat.
Those stories may or may not be lies, but they are certainly not
typical. Note that you get far
fewer profiles or writers like Suzanne Collins, who published a lot of
semi-successful books before she finally hit it big with “The Hunger Games”. Stories like hers, while far more
common, don’t sound like fairy tales, so they don’t get repeated.

Most
screenwriters have to pay their dues for years after they start making money, but before they can do the personally-fulfilling work they were born to do. Matthew
Weiner was a staff writer on “Becker”!
Charlie Kaufman was a staff writer on “Ned and Stacey”! And they didn’t
contemptuously dash off a few scripts that were far beneath their skill
level. They worked hard. That’s real dues
paying. And it starts after you’ve supposedly “made it.”

Wow! Things look bleak for our heroes! Will it get any worse before it gets
better? Find out tomorrow?

Thursday, June 07, 2012

If you’re a would-be filmmaker, then you’re probably not going to impress any pros with your knowledge or talents, no matter how good you
are. Many of them are burn-out-cases with no interest in the next generation, but even the nicer ones have a healthy wariness of the endless numbers of hungry up-and-comers.

Yes, you
should selflessly do lots of amazing favors for people above you on the ladder,
but understand that many of them will simply consider that to be your
obligation. (In fact, they feel that they’re doing you a favor by letting you do them a favor.) And yes, you should also selflessly help people below you on
the ladder, but beware that they may only resent you more as a
result.

Movies and
moviemaking have lost their magic for most filmmakers. Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone,
amateur or pro, how much movies mean to you, because they’ll just roll their
eyes. It’s like someone at a
lawnmower company making a speech about genuinely loving lawnmowers. Nobody is going to believe it.

But… as soon
as you step outside the world of
movie making, most people you meet, even highly-paid professionals, will find
your status as a filmmaker to be enchanting. Even then, they may still be slightly
wary—after all, anyone can claim to be a filmmaker, but if you’ve got a degree,
or a credit, or a prize, or anything that makes you seem legit, then that’s all
they’ll need to be dazzled by you.

I put in a
lot of time assisting professional editors, but I got my first paid solo
editing job because I was the only editor that this client had ever met. Likewise, I apprenticed to a lot of
screenwriters, but I got my first paid gig because I was the only screenwriter
who the author of the novel knew personally.

And it works
the other way too: the more time you spend developing interests outside the
world of film, the more interesting you become to filmmakers, who, after all,
are tired of talking about movies.
Whether at a party or a pitch meeting, they’d much rather hear that you
spent the weekend at a glass-blowing retreat than a Robert McKee seminar.

So when I
got those jobs, had I finally “made it”?
Let’s get to that next time…

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Screenwriting
is a business of razor-thin margins.
For every job opening there are tens of thousands of potential
applicants. It’s really hard to become a
better writer overnight, but it’s much easier to will yourself to be (here’s
that dreaded phrase:) detail-oriented.

Producers,
like any other employer, would rather hire someone with moderate talent and
lots of professionalism than someone with lots of talent and no
professionalism. A screenplay with great dialogue and a lot of typos turns them
off more than a screenplay with so-so dialogue and not a single typo.

Why? Because talent actually can,
eventually, be taught, but it’s almost impossible to beat professionalism into
someone’s head if they don’t want to learn it. They can teach you how to write
dialogue, but they can’t teach you seriousness or respect.

Turn in
drafts on time, even if you suspect that they’re not going to bother to read
them for weeks. Be early for every meeting, even if you know that they’ll
show up twenty minutes late. If they disrespect you, show them up by being
twice as respectful to them. Be a
pro, and you’ll move to the top of your bracket, whatever bracket you’re in.

Go above and
beyond: Reggie Bythwood told me this story about getting hired on “New York Undercover”.
Bythwood had been a writer for the sitcom “A Different World” and he was
explicitly hired to add jokes to the show, but he quickly realized that there was
a problem: creator Dick Wolf tended to put all the experts on policework he
interviewed onto his “Law and Order” staff and fill the “NYU” staff with
hip-dialogue guys, so there was a lack of expertise on the nuts and bolts of
the world of the show.

Bythwood
decided that he would study up on all the procedural stuff, so that he could be
the go-to guy when the other writers had questions about that. Soon enough, everybody loved him. That’s real
professionalism. Do everything
you’ve been hired to do, and then go past it to do whatever needs to be done,
even if it’s not one of the strengths you were supposed to bring to this
job.

Okay, okay, you say, you promise to be good, but what good will it do you if you can’t get hired anywhere? Guess what, tomorrow I’ll finally tell you the number one shortcut to getting your dream job...

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

In any
situation, there’s always going to be someone doing a better job than everybody else. You should be that
person. But you need to accept the
fact that, even if you are the best, you will not advance right away. Four things will happen first:

Other people will pocket the extra value that your work
creates, for a while, without giving you any extra credit. That’s fine.

They might even steal credit for your work, for a while.
That’s fine.

They will also try to get you to do their work, without credit. That’s inevitable, so do it if you
can.

People who are embarrassed by your work will order you to
water your quality down. That’s
not fine. Humbly defer their
requests.

Do you have
a bad boss? Good for you! That’s a
great opportunity. Take your boss’s job. Of course, in the mean time, you’ll have to work extra hard
to please a dud, but that’s okay, because you’re also showing your
boss’s boss that you deserve your boss’s job.

But what if
your boss’s boss doesn’t notice for a long time? And what if your infuriating boss just takes credit for your
output? That’s fine. Let him. Don’t worry about working without recognition, because it’s
impossible: someone is always noticing.
Even if it’s just your fellow co-workers. Even if it’s just the customers.

Of course, if
you’ve been outperforming your boss for a year, and there’s been no reward, it
might be time for a new job, but guess what? You’ll be in a great position to get one. You’ll find that there are a lot of
people around you who will give you a recommendation. Ask those admiring
co-workers if they know anybody else looking for a person in your position
who’s looking to advance. Or ask
those customers who liked you if they know of any other opportunities.

The point
is: don’t do what I did, over and over again, in these situations. Don’t say to yourself, “This supervisor
is terrible, and nobody seems to care, so why do a good job? I might as well slack off.” That’s the best way to ensure one of
two things: either you’ll have to work for that same bad boss forever, or
you’ll leave and be unable to get another job because no one from your old job
will recommend you. Work experience that doesn’t include a recommendation is a liability, not an asset.

This is the
hardest thing in the world to do: Only worry about the quality of your own
contribution. It’s so easy to
think: “My good work will be wasted if everybody else around me is doing bad
work, so why not redirect my energies to pointing out that their work needs to
be better?” No. Nobody wants to hear your criticism. Be
aware of who around you is doing good work and bad work, but don’t point it out
to anybody. If you make a stink, you’ll just stink up the place.

Quality is a
beacon, even if that beacon is temporarily covered in mud. If no one around you
is doing good work, then don’t compare yourself to them. Compare yourself to the people you’d rather be working with and try to meet their level of quality, even if no one
around you seems to appreciate that.

Here’s the
good news, If you have a bad boss, that boss will probably be fired soon, and
another boss will come in who might appreciate you. Never assume that the bad situation is going to
continue. Things change all the
time. You may be unappreciated
today, but if a shake-up happened tomorrow, would you rise to the top? Why not? Worry about that instead of plotting a coup. You don’t need to plot a coup. Shake-ups happen. Everything will be different in a year,
especially in this economy.

So how do
you shine brighter than your co-workers?
We’ll get to that tomorrow…

Monday, June 04, 2012

Yesterday,
we talked about the importance of doing a lot of amazing favors, but I
cautioned that nobody will owe you anything in return. This was one of the hardest things for
me to learn: nobody really owes
anybody anything. It doesn’t matter what you think they owe
you, and it doesn’t even matter how much they actually want
you. The only thing that matters
is how much they need you.

Just because
you have a great resume, or “paid your dues”, or you’ve been best friends with
the boss since childhood, or even if they
promised you a job, they don’t owe you anything. Even people who owe youmoney don’t really owe you that money, unless you made them sign a
legally-enforceable paper contract and you kept a copy with their signature on
it. Even then… not really. People
who don’t really need to pay you
anything aren’t ever going to pay you
anything.

Even when someone truly wants to hire
you, they often can’t. It’s not their
money. (Even if it seems like
their money, it’s not. Everybody
has backers that they are responsible to, even if their name is on the
door.) The only reason that anybody will ever
hire you is because you have demonstrated
to them that you have something they absolutely need.

No one is
going to pay you any of their
money. Instead, they are going to
pay you a share of the money that you help them accumulate. And that’s perfectly fair. It took me a long time to figure out that this is the
whole idea behind employment. The only
reason to hire somebody is if they’re going to bring more money in the door each
month than they take out of the door at the end of the month.

Trust me: every month
that you work, keep a ledger in your head of every dollar that you bring in the
door and every dollar in your paycheck.
If the first number is smaller than the second, your days are numbered. If you want to stay employed, don’t
just be nice, don’t just be
friendly, don’t just be
skillful, don’t just be useful.
None of those are going to keep you employed. Be necessary.

If you are
necessary, they will have to keep you
on, at least for a while, even if they despise you. If you are necessary and
a friendly, professional person, then you’re really set, and your whole life will become a lot happier. We’ll talk about how to do that
tomorrow...

Sunday, June 03, 2012

Filmmaking,
like any other career in the arts, requires you to do a lot of favors, but you have to do so
with your eyes wide open. You have
to be okay with the fact that most favors disappear into the ether, never to be
seen again. That’s okay. The purpose of doing favors is not to get someone to say “this person
did something for me, so now I owe them an opportunity in return.” Few people will have that response.

Realistically,
you’re hoping that, at some point in the future, they will say, “Shit, my plans
fell through, I’m in a bad jam, and I need to call in someone who I can depend
on to do an amazing job at the last minute for almost nothing. Who have I been
able to depend on in the past?”
That day may never come, but if it does, you want to be on their list of
dependable people. You get on that
list by doing amazing favors.

This brings
us to the horrifying truth about favors: If you agree to do a favor, even if
it’s a huge, unreasonable, last-minute favor for the biggest screw-up in town, you
have to do amazing work, better than if you were getting paid.

“What?? Why
is that?? They’re not even paying me!
Can’t I just phone it in?
At least I showed up!”
Don’t believe it. No matter
much they beg and plead and promise you that they just need a quickie job or a
warm body, you still have to say no if you can’t do an amazing job for them.

Agreeing to do a favor, any favor, is
a dangerous opportunity. If you do
a half-ass favor for someone, even if they promised you that you wouldn’t have
to work hard, they will resent it, and they will
bad-mouth you. Even worse, other
people working on the project won’t know that they’re getting paid and you’re not. All they’ll know is that you
did a half-ass job, and they don’t ever want to work with you again.

So you have to be
willing to say no to a favor. The
truth is that, if you do say no, no matter how hurt they pretend to be, they’ll
just shrug and call somebody else and give that person the same song and dance
they gave you. It won’t really
hurt their feelings.

It’s vital to
do as many favors as possible, but only agree to contribute if you’re prepared
to act as if you’re the highest paid person on that project. After all, this is your chance to audition for
everybody involved in this project, all at once. That’s why you do
a favor, not because anybody will owe you anything in return. In fact, in screenwriting as in life, nobody ever really owes anybody anything. More on that tomorrow…